Most newly constructed schools begin life as places of hope, enthusiasm, energy, and
creativity. In many ways they might be considered `moving' schools. Such schools
strive to anticipate and change with the times. Within a relatively short time, however, a
significant number of new schools evolve, indeed regress, into conventional schools. This
loss of initial momentum and innovative direction experienced by many newly established
schools occurs because of what this study describes as the `attrition' of change.
This thesis presents an historical case study of a secondary school that was once one of
Canada's most renowned, innovative schools in the 1970s, and now 26 years later, can be
described as a conventional secondary school. Based on interviews with three cohorts of
teachers and administrators who worked in the school in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the
study provides an opportunity for inquiring into and analysing the attrition of educational
change.
The evidence of this study of the history of an innovative school points to the existence of
an ironic change dynamic, and a dual meaning for the title the attrition of change'. There
is a natural tendency for the school itself to experience attrition and over time to lose
much of its early momentum and innovativeness. This pattern, however, is usually
accelerated by hostility from the school's larger professional and parental communities
who perceive the school's innovations to be a threat to long held educational beliefs and
practices. The staff members of the innovative school feel that their inordinately hard
work is unappreciated and misunderstood, turn inward to school colleagues for protection and support and adopt a less venturesome approach to innovation and change.
In the short term, therefore, the innovative school's influence upon the larger system's
attitude towards change tends to be quite negative. In the longer term, however, the
innovative school seems to exert significant impact beyond its own walls through the
rule-breaking precedents it sets that open up opportunities for others, and through the
key leaders it spawns who take their innovative images of schooling to other parts of the
system, and initiate change elsewhere. Changes in one part of a system inevitably affect
changes in the larger system. Innovative schools, therefore, can erode obstacles to
change in the larger system and create a climate of experimentation where one may not
have existed previously, thus the second meaning of the `attrition of change'.